Sad Dating Apps: Emotional Technological Determinism and Agency in Late Modernity

Grim cultural diagnoses suggest that dating apps make their users feel sad, attributing this to the commodification of intimacy facilitated by digital technology. Dating apps are charged with offering an illusory sense of choice among abundant partners and providing tools for atomizing people and filtering through them, while many caution against the growing dependency on dating apps. Drawing on 30 interviews with Polish LGBTQ people living in the United Kingdom, this article challenges the conflation of dating apps with sadness by distinguishing between “sad dating apps” and “sad dating app users.” I show that users exercise complex forms of agency in recognizing the flaws of digital dating cultures and engaging with them creatively. I argue for research that moves beyond relatively privileged users and global dating apps to better understand the role of digital technologies in society, particularly at the intersection of emotions and agency. While Internet researchers have become more careful in avoiding technologically deterministic arguments when assessing technologies’ general impact or their “effects,” crude claims about how technologies make their users feel persist, which I refer to as emotional technological determinism. More broadly, my research not only underscores the greater agency of users in this respect but also delineates the forms, scales, and scopes of feelings, sometimes contradictory, that technologies provoke, which technologies provoke what feelings, and for whom. Emotions themselves can be more or less agential, and the agency over how one feels when interacting with technology is distributed between technologies, users, and contexts.